Review: The Wonderful 101 will keep you smiling as you slash and smash

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If there is a game out there right now that personifies the Nintendo gaming experience that isn’t made by Nintendo themselves, it is The Wonderful 101.

Few people look to Nintendo for intense action, super realistic graphics, and the online experience that almost seems like a requirement with many titles today. Nintendo games have always balanced simple animations with either a cute but compelling story or uniquely addicting gameplay. Really great Nintendo games will capture all three, but in a world where the most popular Wii U titles are the latest Mario games (or worse, Zelda HD remakes) those games are few and far between.

Enter The Wonderful 101, a new title by Okami and Viewtiful Joe creators Hideki Kamiya and Atsushi Inaba. It’s a fun, fast, and exciting game — exactly what the Wii U needs right now.

The core of the game is simple, in that you’ve got big bad aliens attacking the planet and it is up to you and your 100 friends to wield superpowers to save the day. The superpowers used are where things get interesting. Your team has access to giant superpowered weapons, from fists to swords, whips and hammers, and even a great big gun that you use to take on the creatures that are much larger than you.

What makes these absurdly large weapons amusing is that they are made out of your teammates. Whoever you have set as the leader during combat can assemble his or her giant weapon out of your teammates, and the more you use the bigger the weapon. You assemble these weapons by either drawing on the gamepad or rotating the right joystick until you’ve created the shape required for whatever you need to beat the bad guy. On top of this, you can assemble your whole team into giant springs to bounce out of the way of attacks or a huge serving of gelatin to reflect physical attacks and projectiles back at your enemies.

The game quickly becomes one of strategy, where you pick the best tools to take on the specific enemy in front of you, with the occasional boss fight that requires you to demonstrate your ability to quickly shift between shapes in order to move on to the next stage. In each chapter you are graded on your performance in each segment as well as a final grade for completing the chapter. If you didn’t do so well in one area you can try again just as you are, or adjust your difficulty level before restarting the area.

Playing The Wonderful 101 on the Wii U Gamepad is a great experience, so long as you don’t try and play exclusively on the giant controller. The dual screen experience offered here is great, especially when you get deeper into the game and need to switch quickly between weapons. While using the joystick is great for summoning the sword, trying to summon the hammer the same way is sure to quickly frustrate you.

Being able to draw the corresponding shapes on the pad is quick and fun, but it does take your fingers away from the attack and dodge buttons momentarily. There are times in the game where you enter an underground area or step into a building where all of the gameplay shifts to the Gamepad, allowing you to take advantage of the gyroscope to see the whole area and solve puzzles. This is a fun diversion occasionally, but not so great experience full time. If you press the minus key on the gamepad you can shift gameplay to just the Gamepad, but you still need to flip between the two screen types. This is a really poor experience, and ultimately a perfect example of how not every game should be played on just the Gamepad.

The Wonderful 101 is exactly what Nintendo needed for the Wii U at launch, but now it will serve as the best title for the console moving into the holiday season. In a few weeks, those looking for a new Wii U game to give as a present will have this one great title on a shelf filled with Nintendo titles that feel a little stale by comparison. It’s not hard to see this game becoming one of the most popular in the Wii U lineup by the end of the year.